1. THREE PRIOR REVOLUTIONS IN THE EVOLUTION OF HUMAN COMMUNICATION AND
COGNITION: LANGUAGE, WRITING AND PRINT.

There have been three revolutions in the history of human thought and
we are on the threshold of a fourth. The first took place hundreds of
thousands of years ago when language first emerged in hominid evolution
and the members of our species became inclined -- in response to some
adaptive pressures whose nature is still just the subject of vague
conjecture (Harnad et al. 1976) -- to trade amongst themselves in
propositions that had truth value. There is no question but that this
change was revolutionary, because we thereby became the first -- and so
far the only -- species able and willing to describe and explain the
world we live in. It remains a mystery -- to me at any rate -- why our
anthropoid cousins, the apes, who certainly seem smart enough, do not
share this inclination of ours. At any rate, this divergence between
our two respective species was a milestone in human communication and
cognition, making it possible for culture to develop and be passed on
by oral tradition.

That momentous adaptation seems to have had a neurological basis.
Injuries to certain areas of the left side of the brain -- Wernicke's
area and Broca's area, to be exact -- result in language-specific
deficits in speaking and understanding (Harnad et al 1977; Ojemann
1983). So whatever the evolutionary changes underlying language were,
they were imprinted as permanent modifications of our neural hardware.

The second cognitive revolution was the advent of writing, tens of
thousands of years ago. Spoken language had already allowed the oral
codification of thought; written language now made it possible to
preserve the code independent of any speaker/hearer. It became, if you
like, an implementation-independent code. No one knows for sure whether
there was any corresponding change in our cerebral hardware. There is
nominally a region in the left frontal lobe -- Exner's area -- that is
dubbed the "writing center," and there are certainly specific
neurological problems associated with "dyslexia" or reading disorder.
But all of this neurology is complicated and ill-understood, and no
"pure" alexia (inability to read), without any other associated visual
or motor problems, has been found. So it is more likely, I think, that
writing and reading were cognitive and motor skills that we acquired
without any organic evolutionary change in our brains -- that they were
merely learned adaptations of the same hardware we had all along.

To continue this broad-stroke history: No precise starting point can be
assigned to either science or literature. The former began with the
first true proposition about the world and the latter either with the
first such true proposition that was also formulated elegantly, or
perhaps with the first untrue proposition. In either case, the oral
tradition was already equipped to produce both science and literature,
although perhaps science, being a little too constrained by the limits
of memory and accuracy in the word-of-mouth medium, was the greater
beneficiary of the advent of writing, with the incomparably greater
reliability and systematicity it conferred in preserving the words, and
hence the thoughts, of others.

But there were constraints on writing too. For whereas spoken
language conformed well to both the transmitting and receiving powers
of human thinkers -- and this is perhaps a reflection of its specific
dedicated neurology -- writing was somewhat out of synch with thought.
It was slow. And worse than that, it had much more limited scope, for
whereas a spoken proposition could be heard by several people, even by
multitudes, a written one could only be read by one at a time.
This could be done serially by limitless numbers of readers, to be
sure, and this was the real strength of writing, but it was purchased
at the price of becoming a much less INTERACTIVE medium of
communication than speech. The form and style of written discourse
accordingly adapted to this lapidary new medium -- again, not
neurologically, but consciously and by convention -- constraining the
writer to be more precise in some respects, but also allowing him more
freedom to redraft and reformulate his text in composing it. In
becoming less interactive, writing also became less spontaneous than
speech, more deliberate, more systematic; one might also say it became
less social and more solipsistic, although of course its ultimate
social reach became much larger, limited only by the slow pace of
copyists in providing the text to disseminate.

The third revolution took place in our own millenium: With the
invention of moveable type and the printing press, the laborious
hand-copying of texts became obsolete and both the tempo and the scope
of the written word increased enormously. Texts could now be
distributed so much more quickly and widely that again the style of
communication underwent qualitative changes. If the transition from the
oral tradition to the written word made communication more reflective
and solitary than direct speech, print restored an interactive element,
at least among scholars: and if the scholarly "periodical" was not born
with the advent of printing, it certainly came into its own.
Scholarship could now be the collective, cumulative and interactive
enterprise it had always been destined to be. Evolution had given us
the cognitive wherewithal and technology had given us the vehicle.

Of course, there had already been a prominent exception to the
impersonal trend set in motion by writing, namely, private letters.
These had made it possible for people to communicate even when they
were separated by great distances, although again the pace of the
communication was much slower and less interactive than live
conversation, and it continued to be so, even after the advent of
print.

Many minor and major technological changes followed, but none, I think,
qualify as revolutionary: The means of transportation improved, so the
written word could be circulated more quickly and more widely. The
typewriter (and eventually the word processor) made it much easier to
generate and modify one's texts. Photocopying made it possible to
duplicate, and desktop publishing to print, even texts that weren't
worth duplicating and printing. And the telephone all but did in the
art of letter writing altogether, probably because it restored the
natural tempo of spoken communication to which the brain is
constitutionally adapted. Of course, phoning had the disadvantage of
not leaving a permanent record, but for that there were tape recorders,
etc. etc.

The reason I single out as revolutionary only speech, writing and print
in this panorama of media transformations that shaped how we
communicate is that I think only those three had a QUALITATIVE effect
on how we think. In a nutshell, speech made it possible to make
propositions, hand-writing made it possible to preserve them
speaker-independently, and print made it possible to preserve them
hand-writer-independently. All three had a dramatic effect on HOW we
thought as well as on how we expressed our thoughts, so arguably they
had an equally dramatic effect on WHAT we thought. The rest of the
technological developments were only quantitative refinements of the
media created by speech, writing and print. The purist might, with some
justification, even hold that print was just a quantitative refinement
of writing, but let's argue about that another time; the historic
evidence for the impact of print is considerable (McLuhan 1962).

The two factors mediating the qualitative effects were speed and scale.
Speech slowed thought down, but to a rate for which the brain evolved
specific organic adaptations. Our average speaking rate is a biological
parameter; it is a natural tempo. Hand-writing slowed it down still
further, but here the adaptations were strategic and stylistic rather
than neurological; in writing, the brain was underutilized. Evidence
for this comes from the fact that when the typewriter and the word
processor allowed the pace of writing to pick up again, we were quite
ready to return to a tempo closer to our natural one for speech. On the
other hand, the constraints of the written medium are substantive, and
they affect both form and content, as anyone who has tried to use raw
transcripts of spontaneous speech can attest: What is acceptable and
understandable in spoken form is unlikely to be acceptable and
understandable in written form, and vice versa.

In a sense there are only three communication media as far as our
brains are concerned: The nonverbal medium in which we push, pull, mime
and gesticulate (Greenfield 1991), and two verbal media -- the natural
one, consisting of oral speech (and perhaps sign language), and the
unnatural one, consisting of written speech. Two features conspire to
make writing unnatural; one is the constraint it puts on the speed with
which it allows thoughts to be expressed (and hence also on the speed
with which they can be formulated), and the other is the constraint it
puts on the INTERACTIVENESS of speaking thinkers -- and hence again on
the tempo of their interdigitating thoughts, both collaborative and
competitive. Oral speech not only matches the natural speed of thought
more closely, it also conforms to the natural tempo of interpersonal
discourse. In comparison, written dialogue has always been hopelessly
slow: the difference between "real-time" dialogue and off-line
correspondence. -- hopeless, that is, until the fourth cognitive
revolution, which is just about to take place with the advent of
"electronic skywriting":

2. SCHOLARLY SKYWRITING: A PERSONAL GLIMPSE OF THE POTENTIAL PANORAMA

I must now turn from impressionistic history to personal anecdote.
My own skyward odyssey in the newest communication medium, the airwaves
of electronic telecommunication networks, had its roots in a
long-standing penchant for scholarly letter-writing (to the point of
once having been cited in print as "personal communication, pp. 14 - 20").
These days few share my epistolary bent, which is dismissed as a doomed
anachronism. Scholars don't have the time. Inquiry is racing forward
much too rapidly for such genteel dawdling -- forward toward, among
other things, due credit in print for one's every minute effort. So I
too had to resign myself to the slower turnaround but surer rewards of
conventional scholarly publication. In fact, a decade and a half ago I
founded a scholarly journal in the conventional print medium -- though
BEHAVIORAL & BRAIN SCIENCES (BBS) is hardly a conventional journal.
Modelled on CURRENT ANTHROPOLOGY (CA, which was founded by the
anthropologist Sol Tax, who in turn modelled it on the extreme
participatory democratic practices of the native North American nations
he studied), BBS's unique feature is "creative disagreement" (Harnad
1979). Specializing in important and influential ideas and findings in
the biobehavioral sciences, BBS, after a round of particularly rigorous
peer review (involving five to eight referees representing the multiple
areas that candidate manuscripts must impinge upon), offers to the
authors of accepted papers the service of "open peer commentary." Their
manuscript is circulated to specialists across disciplines and around
the world, inviting each to submit 1000-word commentaries that discuss,
criticise, amplify and supplement the work reported in the target
article, which is then copublished with the commentaries (often twenty
or more) and the author's formal response to them (Harnad 1982).

BBS's open peer commentary service has evidently been found valuable
by the world biobehavioral science community, because already in its
fourth year its "impact factor" (citation ratio) had become one of
the highest in its field (Harnad 1984a,b; Drake 1986). But we are not
here to discuss BBS because it, like other print journals, is still
prisoner to the temporal, geographic and (shall we call them)
"internoetic" constraints of the conventional paper publication medium.
In that medium, new ideas and findings are written up and then
submitted for peer review (Harnad 1985, 1986). The refereeing may take
anywhere from three weeks to three months. Then the author revises in
response to the peer evaluation, and when his article is finally
accepted, it again takes from three to nine months or more before the
published version appears (perhaps earlier, when circulated informally
in preprint form). That's not the end of the wait, however, but only
the beginning, for now the author must wait until his peers actually
read and respond in some way to his work -- incorporating it into their
theories, doing further experiments, or otherwise exploring the
ramifications of his contribution. That's why creative scholars
publish, after all: not to put another line on their CVs but to
collaborate with their peers in expanding our collective body of
knowledge.

It usually takes several years, however, before the literature responds
to an author's contribution, if it responds at all, and by that time
the author, more likely than not, is thinking about something else. So
a potentially vital spiral of peer interactions, had it taken place in
"real" cognitive time, never materializes, and countless ideas are
instead doomed to remain stillborn. The culprit is again the factor of
tempo: the fact that the written medium is hopelessly out of synch with
the human thinking mechanism and the organic potential it would have
for rapid interaction if only there were a medium that could support
the requisite rounds of feedback, IN TEMPO GIUSTO!

Hopeless, as noted earlier, until the forthcoming fourth cognitive
revolution makes it possible to restore scholarly communication to a
tempo much closer to the brain's natural potential while still
retaining the rigor, discipline and permanence of the refereed written
medium: Here I will try to illustrate this prophetic vision with an
account of my own first (unrefereed) glimpse of the Platonic world of
scholarly skywriting:

2.1 PRE-REVOLUTIONARY ANARCHY.

Most of the world's universities and research institutions are linked
together by various international electronic networks such as Bitnet
and Internet (called, collectively, "the Net"). Electronic mail
("email") can be sent via the Net, usually within minutes, to London,
Budapest, Tel Aviv, Tokyo. But the feature that has the most remarkable
potential is MULTIPLE RECIPROCAL EMAIL: Electronic discussion groups in
which every message is immediately disseminated to all members.

These groups first formed themselves anarchically, on various networks,
the biggest of them called Usenet, and were devoted partly to technical
discussion about computers and information, the technologies that had
built the net, and otherwise to "flaming": free-for-all back-and-forth
messages by anyone, on any topic under the sun. Next, discussion groups
devoted to specific topics (computers, politics, language, culture,
sex) began to form, and these in turn split into "unmoderated" and
"moderated" groups. Anyone with an email address whose institution was
connected to Usenet could post to an unmoderated group and the message
would automatically be sent to everyone who was "subscribed" to the
group.

It was because most of the unmoderated groups were quite chaotic that
the moderated groups were formed. In these, all submissions had to be
channeled through a "moderator," but this was usually someone with no
special qualifications or expertise, so the quality of the information
on the moderated groups was still very uneven, and, with a few
exceptions (principally technical discussions about computing itself),
the groups were mostly havens for underinformed students and
dilettantes rather than respectable scholarly forums for learned
specialists in the subject matter under discussion, a subject matter
that by now ranged across the humanities, the social sciences and the
natural sciences.

This was the status quo on the Net -- a communication medium with
revolutionary intellectual potential being used mostly as a global
graffiti board for trivial pursuit (except in the field of computing
itself) -- when I first sampled the skyways several years ago in a
large (unmoderated) Usenet group called "comp.ai" (devoted to the topic
of artificial intelligence, a subfield of my own specialty, cognitive
science). I had heard that there was a lot of ongoing discussion on
comp.ai about something that had appeared in BBS -- Searle's (1980)
"Chinese Room Argument." The content of that discussion is not relevant
here. Suffice it to say that about a profound and complex topic a great
deal of nonsense was being posted on comp.ai by people who knew very
little (mostly students and computer programmers). This
initial demography, and the unscholarly level of discussion that
prevailed because of it, was and still is one of the principal
obstacles to the net's realizing its real potential. For what true
scholar would condescend to join these dilettantes in serious scholarly
discussion, and in such an anarchic medium!

Well, draw your own conclusions, but that did not stop me. Whether it
was my partiality for letter-writing or for creative disagreement, I
decided to test out the airways, but consciously applying self-imposed
constraints, since the medium would not provide them for me. My
postings to comp.ai would, I vowed, be conscientiously thought out and
carefully written, as if they were for a serious refereed journal, with
a sophisticated scholarly readership -- for posterity, in fact. Hardest
of all, I would treat the contributions of my interlocutors as if they
had been serious and scholarly ones too, and when these were uninformed
or in error, I would endeavor to correct them in a dignified and
respectful way that would be informative and instructive to all,
solemnly trying to counter the Nth instance of the same egregious
mistake with an Nth new aspect or dimension of the problem under
discussion, always with the objective of advancing the ideas for all
skygazers. Indeed, critical to my efforts at sobriety and
self-discipline was maintaining for myself a conscious fantasy that,
silent among the thousands of eyes trained skyward, were my peers, and
not just the rookies I was jousting with.

But lest it be thought that this was all just some sort of altruistic
exhibition, let me hasten to report that I found myself by far the
greatest beneficiary of this exercise. For the remarkable fact is that
even under these primitive demographic conditions my own ideas profited
enormously from the skywriting interactions. The problem under
discussion (and it only became evident to me during the discussion just
WHAT that problem was) I dubbed, in the course of the skywriting, "the
symbol grounding problem," and it has since generated not only a series
of (alas, conventional, ground-based) papers (Harnad 1990a, 1991,
1992c), but also a cottage industry in the form of a theme for
workshops and symposia (e.g. Harnad et al. 1991), and soon, no doubt,
dissertations. All this as a consequence of aerobatics with mere
rookies . "So what would it have been like," I then quite naturally
asked myself, "if the best minds in the field were on the net,
skywriting away with the rest of us?"

2.2 PSYCOLOQUY: TEST PILOTING A MODEL FOR FUTURE ELECTRONIC JOURNALS.

When I founded BBS fifteen years ago, I had been inspired by the
striking potential of "open peer commentary" as revealed through an
article by Gordon Hewes (1973) in Sol Tax's commentary journal, CA.
That article was about the origin of language, a topic that had been
under an informal moratorium (as breeding only idle conjectures)
imposed by the Societe Linguistique de Paris in 1866. Reading Hewes and
his animated commentators across disciplines prompted me to (1)
co-organize an international conference under the auspices of the New
York Academy of Sciences (Harnad et al 1976, a conference that
effectively put an end to the century-long moratorium on the topic and
went on to spawn an uninhibited series of language-origins conferences,
e.g., Raffler-Engel et al. 1991). In addition, as already noted, I
founded BBS, convinced that Sol Tax's "CA Comment" principle could be
generalized beyond its discipline of origin. A decade and half later,
my own rewarding experience with electronic skywriting has convinced me
that this newest medium's unique potential to support and sustain open
peer commentary must now be made generally available too, so I founded
PSYCOLOQUY, a BBS of the air, unfettered by the temporal and spatial
constraints of the earthbound print medium (Garfield 1991, Katz 1991,
Wilson 1991).

I will now describe the PSYCOLOQUY project here in some detail as it is
intended to serve as a model for future electronic journals. Originally
initiated in 1985 by Bob Morecock of Houston University as an
electronic Bulletin Board called the "Bitnet Psychology Newsletter,"
PSYCOLOQUY was transformed in 1989 into a refereed electronic journal
(ISSN Number 1055-0143) and is now sponsored on an experimental basis
by the Science Directorate of the American Psychological Association. I
am Co-Editor for scientific contributions, and the Co-Editor for
clinical, applied and professional contributions is Perry London, Dean
of the Graduate School of Applied and Professional Psychology at
Rutgers University. One of PSYCOLOQUY's principal scholarly objectives
is to implement peer review on the Net in psychology and its related
fields (cognitive science, neuroscience, behavioral biology,
linguistics, philosophy). All contributions are refereed by a member of
PSYCOLOQUY's Editorial Board (currently 70 members and growing), but
the idea is not just to implement a conventional journal in electronic
form. PSYCOLOQUY is explicitly devoted to scholarly skywriting, the
radically new form of communication made possible by the Net, in which
authors post to PSYCOLOQUY a brief account of current ideas and
findings on which they wish to elicit feedback from fellow-specialists
as well as experts from related disciplines the world over.

The refereeing of each original posting and each item of peer feedback
on it is to be done very quickly, sometimes within a few hours of
receipt, so as to maintain the momentum and interactiveness of this
unique medium, just as if each contribution were being written in the
sky, for all peers to see and append to. Skywriting promises to restore
the speed of scholarly communication to a rate much closer to the speed
of thought, while adding to it a global scope and an interactive
dimension that are without precedent in human communication, all
conducted through the discipline of the written medium, monitored by
peer review, and permanently archived for future reference. Scholarly
Skywriting in PSYCOLOQUY is intended especially for that prepublication
"pilot" stage of scientific inquiry in which peer communication and
feedback are still critically shaping the final intellectual outcome
(Mahoney 1985). That formative stage is where the Net's speed, scope and
interactiveness offer the possibility of a phase transition in the
evolution of knowledge, one in which we break free from the earthbound
inertia that has encumbered human inquiry until now, soaring at last to
the skyborn speeds to which our minds were organically destined (Harnad
1990b).

PSYCOLOQUY appears in two forms. Its Usenet version, called
"sci.psychology.digest", is "gatewayed" to the Net from Princeton
University. Its Bitnet version, formerly stored at Tulane University
and archived at the University of Houston, is now at Princeton too. The
Bitnet version currently has around 3000 individual subscribers and
redistribution lists. The Usenet version (which is transmitted to sites
rather than individuals, and hence is not directly monitored for number
of subscribers) may well be reaching an order of magnitude more readers
(over 20,000, according to Usenet's monthly "arbitron" readership
surveys).

PSYCOLOQUY is fully international, with subscribers in the Americas,
Europe, Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, the Middle and Far East, and
growing parts of the third world (where electronic journals promise to
be a godsend for the libraries and scholars who have hitherto been
information deprived because of currency restrictions and budget
limitations). Subscription to PSYCOLOQUY is free: To subscribe, anyone
with a login on any of the networks can send the following one line
email message to listserv@pucc.bitnet: "sub psyc Firstname Lastname"
(omitting quotes and substituting your own first and last name); the
message must originate from the email address at which you wish to
receive PSYCOLOQUY. Subsequent postings are sent to psyc@pucc.bitnet or
to psyc@phoenix.princeton.edu

PSYCOLOQUY currently appears about once a month, but we are prepared to
publish it much more frequently as the submission rate and demand
increase. Back issues of PSYCOLOQUY are archived at Princeton and can
be retrieved from any Internet email address directly by a simple
procedure called "anonymous ftp." Princeton also has a service called
"bitftp" that allows issues to be retrieved indirectly from Bitnet by
email (other services exist, for example, for JANET subscribers in the
United Kingdom). Soon, with the help of an experimental searchable
data-base provided by Bellcore and some collaborative efforts with the
American Mathematical Society, it should be possible not only to
retrieve items but to do interactive full-text searches of the
PSYCOLOQUY archive in informal English from both Bitnet and Internet.

3. HASTENING THE REVOLUTION.

This fourth revolution has not yet taken place. Some of the impediments
have already been noted: The current demography of the Net and the
stereotype it has created of the medium as not suitable for serious
scholarly communication, the ingrained habits of a scholarly community
adapted to the paper medium for centuries, the foot-dragging of the
paper publishing industry, with all its interests vested in the
ground-based technology, and many prima facie doubts and objections
(about quality, academic credit, security, etc.), all of which are
easily and decisively answerable (see, for example, Harnad 1990b,
1992b), even though they keep getting raised again and again (an
attempt to lay to rest these prima facie objections is in preparation,
Harnad [in prep.] ).

It is a foregone conclusion that the revolution will come; my selfish
concern is with getting it underway while I am still compos mentis and
in a position to partake of its intellectual benefits! Allies in
hastening its coming will be (1) research libraries, whose budgets are
overburdened with the expenses associated with the print medium, (2)
learned societies, whose primary motivation is to get refereed
scholarly information disseminated to the peer community as quickly and
fully as possible, and (3) the scholarly community itself, who will
surely realize that it is they, not the publishers who merely give it
the imprimatur, who are the controllers of the quality of the scholarly
literature through peer review -- not to mention that they are also the
creators of the literature itself. (A strategic pro-revolutionary
alliance among libraries, learned societies and universities may be in
order. One hopes that governments, too, will be far-seeing enough to
realize that the benefits of subsidizing the intellectual highways for
all scholars and scientists will far outweigh the costs.)

But the most important factor in hastening the onset of the fourth
cognitive revolution will surely be the unique capabilities of the
medium itself. Electronic journals should not and will not be mere
clones of paper journals, ghosts in another medium. What we need, and
what PSYCOLOQUY will endeavor to help provide, are some convincing
demonstrations of the unique power of scholarly skywriting (see Hayes
et al. 1992 for a sample of skywriting reproduced in print). I am
convinced that once scholars have tasted it, they will become addicted
for life, as I did. And once word gets out that there are some
remarkable things happening in this medium, things that cannot be
duplicated by any other means, these conditions will represent for the
scholarly community an "offer they cannot refuse." We are then poised
for a lightning-fast phase transition, again a unique feature of the
scale and scope of this medium, one that will forever leave the
land-based technology far behind, as scholarship is at last launched
into the post-Gutenberg galaxy.

NOTE

This paper was originally published in the Public-Access Computer
Systems Review, an electronic journal on Bitnet's Listserv
(pacs-l@uhupvm1.bitnet).